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A non-technological way to give negative feedback to Twitter/X is to stop using it, even "just reading an occasional post". Continuing to read things on it, ev
by neilv 11d ago
A non-technological way to give negative feedback to Twitter/X is to stop using it, even "just reading an occasional post".
Continuing to read things on it, even through Nitter, is in the interests of Twitter/X and of the people who continue to support Twitter/X by posting there.
Tell the people who use it no. The decent people won't hear them on Twitter/X, and the decent people will wonder what's wrong with them if they persist in supporting that thing.
Tech industry circles nowadays are sometimes tinged with individualist selfish "take whatever you can" thinking, and anarchic or even underhanded methods. Including the thinking "an express no doesn't mean no, if i can find a way to take it from them anyway."
Grassroots collective social action can work, if it isn't constantly undermined by selfish and short-sighted taking.
- g8oz 11d agoA related essay with the same take: https://publiccomment.blog/p/it-is-past-time-for-you-to-quit-elon-musk-s-x https://publiccomment.blog/p/it-is-past-time-for-you-to-quit...
- mitxela 11d agoWhy is scrolling broken?
- veltas 11d agoI feel like I'm living under a rock reading this post. What are the problems with Twitter, why does it need boycotting?
- pmlnr 11d agoFor starts, there's no such thing as Twitter any more, and hasn't been, for years.
- veltas 11d agoOkay but that's not really relevant as the name changing is not a reason to leave/boycott?
- rmuchall 11d agoThere is no problem with X (formerly Twitter). Some people got their panties in a twist because Elon Musk bought it.
- qznc 10d agoI don't want media under control of billionaires like Musk. I mostly stopped using Twitter myself but many important institutions still feel compelled to publish there (sometimes even exclusively), thus I would like other people to also stop using it, so it can perish. Hopefully something better will fill that void. The Fediverse seems promising being a distributed system with no central control.
- phatfish 10d agoI wish i could forget the last 6 years as well (to be clear, post COVID nonsense).
- mbmbn 11d ago[dead]
- wolvoleo 11d ago> Tech industry circles nowadays are sometimes tinged with individualist selfish "take whatever you can" thinking, and anarchic or even underhanded methods. Including the thinking "an express no doesn't mean no, if i can find a way to take it from them anyway" I agree with that though. It's better to circumvent than to submit and do what you're told. The same way piracy keeps streaming services somewhat honest, I'm sure that if piracy didn't exist, subscriptions would be even pricier.
- bayesnet 11d agoThe piracy thing is a bit backwards I think. Piracy is a consequence of subscription price so higher prices induce more piracy. The only way piracy doesn’t exist is if all content is free to begin with
- phlakaton 11d agoAnd the reason that piracy doesn't exist in that case is because the creators have all had to go out of business. ;-)
- wolvoleo 10d agoYeah but I don't care about that. I'm not here to make the system work. It's skewed against us consumers anyway.
- phlakaton 10d agoYou say that like it's a bad thing. Consumers are worth less than creators in the cosmic scheme of things. I believe we should be much friendlier to consumers than our laws currently allow, but there should be a balance, and that balance should not privilege consumers above all.
- wolvoleo 8d agoIt is a bad thing. And the system is skewed against creators too. It favours exclusively the rent-seeking rich middle man.
- eudamoniac 11d agoThis all already happened, it's called bluesky, and the "decent" (people who agree with you on politics) people had their exodus already
- orwin 11d agoTo me, the divide Twitter/Bluesky is the divide between terminally only idiots and terminally online simpletons (you decide which is which). Decent people are on neither.
- dminik 11d agoI see that they're not on HN either.
- Gareth321 11d agoI don't know how HN has remained as chill as it has compared to other social media platforms, but I'm grateful. I can still have deep conversations here without people losing their minds and yelling expletives and death threats. It feels a lot like forums or Reddit back in the 2000s.
- Zetaphor 11d agodang and team tread carefully but carry a big stick
- tekla 11d agoHN remains chill because 99% of political dissent is squashed
- megagpt3 11d ago[dead]
- noir_lord 11d agoMostly reasonable moderation does it, I’ve seen a noticeable uptick in green accounts posting slop/weird stuff but I just flag them and move on. HN isn’t perfect but it’s doesn’t have to be to still have value and yeah it does feel a lot like the older web at least more than most things do.
- mrobot 11d agoi too was thinking the Star Dink may just welcome nitter anyway
- evan_ 11d ago"oh you said 'nitter', yeah that's OK"
- beanjuiceII 11d agoyou need a mental check if you think there are not decent people who use and enjoy X
- customguy 11d agoIf THEY would use themselves as excuse for the rest, like you do with them, I wouldn't consider them decent people. There are decent people in the US military and police force, there may be even a stray decent ICE agent. I bet you there's decent people getting sent into the meat grinder by Putin, too. But if any of them were adamant about not wanting to hear about all sorts of fuckery of what they are part of or any overarching context, because they are oh so decent, they're not decent, they're just spineless. It's subjective anyway, and bitching about it never ever helps the verdict.
- jcims 11d agoI've gone through several cycles of religion in my life. In various parts of that spectrum I've wondered why humans invented it. Five decades deep it's becoming more and more evident to me that there is some kind of deeply ingrained need for it in wide swaths of humanity...regardless of what it actually looks like in practice.
- codersfocus 11d agoI don’t understand what your question has to do with op but I’ll explain it to you. Religion and language are very similar, both in how they are transmitted and how they shift. The latter systematizes thought and the former emotions. Language is encoded by vocal utterances, characters, hand gestures, etc… Religion by rituals, stories, customs. The purpose of it is to handle the common emotional needs of man. The starting point is the grief that comes from a dead person -> you need a ritual to handle the body and process emotions. Next you need to handle who has sex with whom as that is another big area of emotional turbulence in man. Then relationships between parent and child. And so on… Write it down and get people to follow it, you have a religion. Which will shift and split over time as does language. It can be completely distinct from the origin of everything though many choose to incorporate deities into their stories to give weight and meaning, this harnesses the inherent respect for father figures people tend to be born with to achieve this.
- someothherguyy 11d ago[flagged]
- lern_too_spel 11d agoThose are certainly some words to describe people who share on sites that require readers to log in when there are many alternatives that don't.
- deleted 11d ago[deleted]
- wpietri 11d agoI was one of Twitter's first 500 users. Later, I worked at Twitter on anti-abuse. I was a big fan. But I quit using it after Musk's takeover because I didn't want to be supporting somebody who's awful in a half-dozen ways that have only become more obvious. [1] And X reflects that. I'm not the OP, but anybody honestly wanting to know why people think good humans should not use Twitter does not have far to look. 1. E.g., https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk-posts-january-white-supremacists https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/04/24/musk-online-posts-race-whiteness/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/04/24/musk-on... or his Economist interview.
- simplify 11d ago[flagged]
- snailmailman 11d agoThe article uses "posting about race" in the headline, but makes it pretty clear in the content that he is pushing racist white supremacist ideas.
- jamal-kumar 11d ago
- asnf-qwpz 11d agoTwitter is the country club for right and left wing elites. They don't care about viewership, they want to influence each other and chat. They have thousands of other ways to influence the masses by owning media, other discussion platforms, owning institutions and foundation members and running PR campaigns. It is better if their actions on Twitter are observed, documented and archived rather than letting them have complete privacy. That is also why journalists of all political leanings are still there.
- 8note 11d ago> Tech industry circles nowadays are sometimes tinged with individualist selfish "take whatever you can" thinking, and anarchic or even underhanded methods. Including the thinking "an express no doesn't mean no, if i can find a way to take it from them anyway." i see twitter's takedowns as the same? its claiming ownership over content it only has a license to nitter is an instance of collective social action - it only works because people who want to post on and use twitter then mirror stuff to nitter
- arjie 11d ago> Tech industry circles nowadays are sometimes tinged with individualist selfish "take whatever you can" thinking, and anarchic or even underhanded methods. Including the thinking "an express no doesn't mean no, if i can find a way to take it from them anyway." Is that particularly tech industry? Software and media piracy, ad block tools, etc. are all based on this principle.
- Wowfunhappy 11d agoI don't think it's good to make myself less informed. I have no intention of chatting on Twitter casually or browsing it for fun, but if a major announcement is posted only on Twitter—and I don't know why people keep doing that, but they do—I want to read the original source.
- randunel 11d agoName and shame them.
- esskay 11d agoLiterally every single UK government entity, town/city council, every public transport company, etc. They all use it sadly.
- kwarcode 11d agoAny specific examples where twitter was the only way?
- doublepg23 11d agoAs an anecdote from the States: During July 4th our city had some poor weather and the best way to check the status of any celebrations going on was their Twitter page.
- esskay 10d agoA good example would be Supertram - the Sheffield tram service. It's only ever provided service disruption notices on twitter. The stations have digital signs which they installed years ago and have always been completely flawed in that they cant actually update them remotely, nor can they say if a tram is running late. They just play a fixed playlist on a loop.
- Wowfunhappy 11d agoBoth Anthropic and OpenAI will sometimes make important announcements only on Twitter.
- deleted 11d ago[deleted]
- lrvick 11d agoI agree with everything you said and abandoned my Twitter account and everything on it years ago for these reasons. Everything, except for your usage of anarchism to imply chaos or disorder, which is a common misunderstanding. Anarchism, particularly the flavor I subscribe to which is Social Anarchism, is a pursuit of social order, freedom, and prosperity without centralized authorities like Musk.
- slowin 11d agoThank you for saying this. I totally agree with the OPs comment, but the use of anarchism is off. In fact collectivist anarchism is likely to improve the situation and at least, in theory, produce less predatory entities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivist_anarchism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivist_anarchism
- mxmilkiib 11d agoI'm fond of the communalism of Murray Bookchin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communalism_(Bookchin) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communalism_(Bookchin) their ideas of liberatory technology and post-scarcity anarchism are refreshing https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lewis-herber-murray-bookchin-towards-a-liberatory-technology https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/lewis-herber-murray-... https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post-scarcity-anarchism-book https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-post... plus the Kurds & co evolved their own system from the "libertarian municipalism" Bookchin described https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_confederalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_confederalism
- slowin 10d agoThank you for the pointers! These look very interesting.
- gchamonlive 11d agoAnarchism is questioning authority for authority sake. If you put yourself in the place of authority to tell other people what's anarchism you are in for a bad time. The disagreement is the key value of anarchism. The dialectical pendulum, the exchange of ideas. Disagreeing is expressing anarchism, even if you disagree with the other party's understanding of anarchism.
- ipython 11d agoThe trouble is that many us government figures exclusively post information via x (and to some extent Facebook as well)
- GolfPopper 11d agoAre you speaking of public services, like the National Weather Service (also on Facebook, and host their own website), or about politicians and their appointees? Because while the public service arm of the U.S. government still does a ton of critical and often-underappreciated work, the semantic content of U.S. politicians' posts is effectively nil.
- ipython 10d agoBoth. (See for example @dhsgov) Unfortunately those politicians are the ones who directly affect lives of all of us through their words and actions. Your defeatist attitude is one of the reasons we are in this mess in the first place. Why should you or anyone else accept this as a status quo?
- bluecalm 11d agoWhat is that with this random hate? There are tons of decent people posting/reading X. I am sure most of them do it because they like the site. Maybe because random detached from reality hate comments like that don't get much engagement.
- throwawaycan 11d agoOne of the most hateful human being control this social network. There’s tons of decent people in a nazi bar isn’t the test of what makes it a great place to be.
- alightsoul 11d agoWe have to move people to mastodon or bluesky. Stop using x Twitter
- mitxela 11d agoWebsites. It's websites. We're not moving from centralised platform A to centralised platform B in an age where people are giving up on centralised platforms altogether.
- alightsoul 11d agoNon technical people have always used centralized platforms starting from geocities, Google, Yahoo, it's cheaper than hiring someone to do it for them.
- TiredOfLife 11d agoOn twitter there are many incredibly hateful, rude, ignorant and ill informed people and you can block them or add community notes. On mastodon or bluesky it's only them and no community notes.
- dingaling 11d agoNo, that's almost as bad. Locking knowledge into a benignly-ruled centralised blackbox instead of a despicably-ruled centralised blackbox isn't solving the core problem.
- riffraff 11d agowell, you can publish and consume ActivityPub from any wordpress instance. You can likewise publish to ATProto, AFAIK. It's more convenient to use mastodon.social or bsky.app but they're not inherently "centralised blackboxes".
- alightsoul 10d agoThat's bluesky and mastodon working as intended. Easy like a centralized platform for everyone, while staying decentralized for nerds.
- mitxela 11d agoI don't know if this works. They have their target audience. A different audience avoiding it doesn't make them shut down. I don't like sportsball, but me not watching a sportsball game doesn't make the league shut down.
- throwawaycan 11d agoIt’s a social network. Less people on it = less ads dollar. You not building the network is making it less valuable and important. It’s something.
- mitxela 10d ago[dead]
- burnished 11d agoHey I stopped using it and facebook years ago! Couldnt agree more.
- partyficial 11d agoI can never ever understand the sentiment of - 'If I do/do-not-do XYZ, it won't make a difference since millions of people are still not-doing/doing XYZ in the world'. It gives same energy as "If I avoid murder, it won't make a difference since murders still happen in the world. If I avoid meat to help climate change, it won't make a difference since millions still eat meat". The goal is not to get the WORLD to stop. It is to get ME to stop. I will reap its benefits regardless of what happens to others.
- vrganj 11d agoBut you won't reap the benefits. You'll just be cut out of the conversation that's still happening. To me, what you advocating for is performative self-flagellation, not a solution to the systemic issue. The system's still there. You're just pretending it isn't and losing access to its contents. The more correct approach is to exfiltrate the information from the system while starving it of ad revenue.
- partyficial 9d ago> You'll just be cut out of the conversation that's a bad thing ? > you won't reap the benefits but that IS my claim - I will reap benefits proportional to my actions (good or bad). e.g. if global warming causes a flood, my house may be destroyed because I drove cars, but a boat would save me because I was vegetarian. (the next salvo in this conversation will immediately turn into religious theology, so if that's not your thing, ignore this)
- left-struck 11d agoI think the problem is that it’s not black and white, it’s case by case. Some things are just not worth your effort/energy/opportunity cost. Like the difference you’re making by boycotting is so minuscule compared to the enormous downside to you. So you gotta draw your own line in that situation. I also think the murder thing is different. A lot of these do/dont do xyz things are bad because so many people do/dont. If you were alone in doing/not doing it wouldn’t be an issue by itself. Of course that’s not true for Murder.
- gloosx 11d agoPeople will keep coming with an excuse like there is some crucial information posted exclusively on twitter and their life depends on it, like venue/corporate annoucements and whatever else SMM people are posting there
- af78 11d ago> Continuing to read things on it, even through Nitter, is in the interests of Twitter/X Yet Twitter/X sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Nitter folks, which seems to contradict the idea that they think people reading content via Nitter is in their interest IMHO.
- numpad0 11d agoI doubt that works. They would be fine keeping it up indefinitely as their internal Slack. What I think would work better is to just keep using it like nothing happened except a child with skill issue has been ruining it, which require no pretentious, deliberate, or dishonest behavior. The Twitter HQ had always fought its userbase and culture, not always relentlessly with passion, but never really loved it. The relationship between Twitter, Inc. and its user hivemind was always Clockwork Orange toxic. Though Musk trying to ruin it and getting his brain absolutely deep fried in a massive brain inflammation is his own doing, Musk ending up owning it in the first place, for the large part, is result of its former owners throwing in the towel.
- Levitz 10d ago> The decent people won't hear them on Twitter/X, and the decent people will wonder what's wrong with them if they persist in supporting that thing. Escaping this warped version of morality is precisely what many seek when browsing the site and the reason why many celebrated Musk's purchase. Also why many say that bluesky is a shithole.
- pier25 10d agoI stopped using it last year but after hearing the news they trained grok on child pornography I deleted my account. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/elon-musks-xai-used-child-porn-to-train-grok-models-lawsuit-says/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/elon-musks-xai-u...
- d0mine 10d agoCould you point to a resource that explains (concisely if possible) why twitter shouldn’t be used unlike other social media platforms? Is it because it is controlled now by a different branch of the powers that be? (different branch — same tree).
- cowboylowrez 10d agoI think it being controlled by that different branch is part of it, but that includes the undesirable attributes of that different branch, and I don't think we need to go into the details of those attributes lol